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Digital advertising can be a bit of a minefield.
There are so may phrases and acronyms (mainly beginning with a C) that you'll come across when you first start advertising. Not fully understanding what those terms mean though can result in you spending your ad budget and getting very little in return. That's why I've listed some of the most common terms and what they mean below.
- Ad extension- Extra information about your business within the advert like your address or phone number.
- A/B testing- A method used to test versions of an ad with slight differences to see which version performs better.
- Ad rotation- A setting that lets you rotate your ad sets. You can either select to rotate your ads manually or let Google rotate them automatically for you.
- Analytics- Data taken from your website, social media and PPC ads that you can use to identify trends, and better understand your customers decision making process.
- Bid Management- Increasing or decreasing the amount you spend on each of your keywords.
- Blog- Regular articles published online which could include photos and videos. Blogging is good for driving traffic to your website and raising your search rankings.
- Boosted post- A social media post that you put money behind to increase its visibility.
- Call extensions: A feature that allows you to add your business phone number under your PPC ad. When it's clicked, the user will call your business and Google will count this as a conversion if set up correctly.
- Conversion rate- The percentage of users who complete your overall marketing goal. This could be anything from a download, a purchase or a sign up to a newsletter.
- CPA(Cost per Acquisition)- The cost of acquiring customers. You can calculate your cost per acquisition by dividing the total amount spent on advertising by the number of customers you acquired.
- CPC (Cost per click)- Cost per click is very similar to pay per click. When you set up your adverts, you may also have the option to set a 'Max CPC'. This is basically setting the maximum you are willing to pay for someone to click on your advert.
- CPL (Cost per Lead)- The amount it costs an advertiser to get a lead.
- CTA (Call To Action)- A phrase, graphic element and/or button which helps the audience take an important action.
- CTR (Click Through Rate)- The percentage of people who see your ad and then clicked it.
- CPM (Cost Per Mille / Cost Per Thousand): The price of 1,000 impressions of your advert.
- Daily Budget- Amount of money you're willing to spend each day that your advert runs for.
- Engagements- The total amount of likes, comments, shares and link clicks.
- Engagement rate- Written as a per cent, to work this out, you need to divide the total lifetime engagement by the total engaged users.
- Google Ads- If a customer wants to find out about a product or service, the first place they'd likely go to is Google. They type in their search term and at the very top of the results, will be 3 or 4 listings with "Ad" next to them - these are PPC Google Ads. PPC advertising runs across a number of search engines as well as on social media. PPC advertising on Google is known as Google Ads, and on social media is a sponsored post or social media advert.
- Headline- The first line of your Ad. It's what the user sees first.
- Keyword- A set of words or phrases chosen by an advertiser. They'll put money behind their advert so when a potential customers searches for those words or phrases, they'll see the advertisers advert.
- Keyword Planner- Google's Keyword planner helps advertisers find keywords and negative keywords related to their advert.
- KPI (Key Performance Indicator)- A metric which is tracked over time to determine progress towards a business goal.
- Impression- The total number of views of your advert.
- Advertising landing page- The page on your website where users land after they've clicked on your PPC ad.
- Location Targeting- Limiting who can see your adverts by geographic region.
- Lookalike Audience- Targets people who share the same demographic data as your existing audiences.
- Link building- A strategy to boost traffic and search engine rankings by getting other websites to link to yours.
- Lifetime budget- The total amount of money you're willing to spend on your advertising between a start and end date.
- Negative Keywords- Keywords that you've added to your Google Ad account that you don't want your adverts associated with. Identifying negative keywords will help your ad campaign draw in more qualified clicks.
- PPC (Pay Per Click)- An online advertising model which is the cost the advertiser pays every time their advert is clicked on.
- Paid search- Placing paid-for adverts in the search engine results page.
- Reach- The total number of individual users who saw your advert. If the same person saw your advert five times, the reach would be one but the impressions would be five.
- Retargeting- Showing adverts to people who have already visited your website or completely an important action to drive the conversion process.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)- Also known as return on investment. Measuring the amount of revenue earned for every pound spent on advertising.
- SEO- On-page Search Engine optimisation is improving the quality of the content on your website to boost its rankings in the SERP.
- Social advertising- Running paid-for adverts on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
- SERP- Search Engine Results Page is where you appear in the Google search.
- UTM- A way of getting a much-better idea of how your campaign is delivering. There are a number of pre-defined elements called UTM parameters which you can modify.
Everyone at GEL who runs PPC advertising is Google Ads certified. This means they're recognised by Google as an expert in online advertising. If you'd like to find out more about how we could work together to help supercharge your advertising get in touch using our contact forms.
